Saturday, May 21, 2016

Russians Won’t Admit Expulsion of Circassians was Genocide -- But Ukrainians Should

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 21 – One hundred fifty-two years ago today, tsarist forces defeated the Circassians in the North
Caucasus after the latter had successfully resisted the Russian advance for 101
years and then the Russian government expelled most of them to the Ottoman
Empire, completing the genocidal policy that St. Petersburg had decided upon
early on.

Russian officials to this day can’t
admit this not only because to do so would allow many of the five million
Circassians in the diaspora to return home, changing the ethnic balance in the
North Caucasus away from Moscow, and because such honesty would inevitably
provoke more questions about Russia’s imperial policies elsewhere.

But
on this anniversary in particular, one that pro-Moscow groups even more in the
past are seeking to limit the commemoration of within Russia and beyond and to
confuse the issue in the minds of many, Ukrainians should take the lead in
recognizing what Russia did as genocide not only on moral grounds but because
of the role Circassians have played in Ukrainian history.

The
Israeli scholar points out that the Circassians resisted the expansion of
Russian power in the Caucasus longer than anyone else, from 1763 to 1864, thus earning
the grudging respect of those who took part in the battles against them but
also the undying hatred of the Russian state which decided that it could only
hold the region by getting rid of its residents.

Already in September 1829,
Shmulyevich says, Nicholas I wrote that “having finished one glorious task [the
war with Turkey], we now have another, just as complicated and in terms of
direct benefit to us much more important the suppression of all the mountain peoples and the destruction of the disobedient.”

Nicholas
I did not live to see that day; and Russia’s greatest poet, Aleksandr Pushkin
in his “Passage to Arzrum” put the Russian “task” even more clearly: “The
Circassians,” he wrote, “hate us. We have driven them out of their customary
fields, their auls have been burned, whole tribes have been destroyed.”

As a
result, the poet continued, “there is almost no way to pacify [the Circassians]
even after they are disarmed as were disarmed the Crimean Tatars.

At the
end of the 101-year war, the Russian army in the North Caucasus numbered some
300,000 men and was suffering annual losses of 30,000. The Russian state was
spending a sixth of its budget on the task of defeating the Circassians and
their allies, and it was prepared to be brutal, Shmulyevich says.

“In the
course of military operations,” he writes, “the Russian army burned auls
together with their residents,” and it “widely applied the tactic of the terror
famine [holodomor] by destroying crops and reserves of food, condemning the
mountaineers to hunger.” And not least, “the tsarist government took the
decision to completely cleanse the Caucasus from its indigenous residents, the
Circassians, to physically destroy an entire people.”

Those it
couldn’t destroy in this way, the tsarist authorities decided, must be expelled
beyond the borders of the empire.As one
Russian general put it, the Russian state needs the lands of the Circassians,
but it has no need for the Circassian people and so they must be killed or
expelled.

Tsarist
historians had no problem talking about this and about the losses involved.
According to Russian government accounts of those times, more than 400,000
Circassians were killed and 497,000 forced to leave the empire. From what had
been an autochthonian nation in the region of more than a million remained
“about 80,000” Circassians.

A large
number of Circassians who were expelled to the Ottoman Empire, Shmulyevich
says, never made it to their destination. Only about a third of those who were
put on ships in Sochi arrived alive on the other side of the Black Sea. The
rest died from hunger, disease, and drowning.

This was
an obvious case of genocide, the physical destruction of a people on the basis
of its identity alone. Unfortunately, the Russian authorities continue to deny
that their predecessors committed a genocide and have gone further by dividing
up the Circassian nation into five parts in five different administrative
districts.

Circassians–
and they number more than 500,000 in the North Caucasus and five million in the
diaspora -- Shmulyevich notes, are “struggling for unity, for the right to
return to their historical Motherland, for the preservation of their culture
and historical memory and for recognition of the most horrible crimes committed
against them – genocide and a terror famine.”

For a
variety of reasons, the Israeli analyst continues, “the much suffering
Ukrainian people as no one else can with sympathy and understanding relate to
the tragedy of the Circassian people which has been deprived of its rights to
return to its Motherland and even to the right of historical memory.

There
are ancient ties between Ukrainians and Circassians, he says. Indeed, the
Circassians played a major role in the ethnogenesis of the Ukrainian nation.That is obvious from the toponym “Cherkassy,”
but there is far more to these links than that.

“Many
groups of Circassians who settled in Ukraine became part of the Ukrainian
people,” he writes. Circassians first came to Ukraine in the ninth century as
is mentioned in the chornicles, and as people with a longstanding military
tradition even then, they helped form the Cossacks of the region.

In the
course of the 14th and 15th centuries, there were
“several waves of Circassian military emigration” to Ukraine; and these settles
“assimilated among the constantly increasing Slavic population” as shown by the
use of ending “-ko” which in Circassian means “son of” and the appearance of
Ukrainian names of Circassian origin like Mazepa.

More
recently, Circassians were to be found in the ranks of the Ukrainian Partisan
Army (UPA) resisting Moscow, Shmulyevich says; and the Circassians have also
developed “very close relations with the Crimean Tatars.”

In 2011,
Georgia became the first country to officially recognize what the Russians did
to the Circassians as genocide. Now, Ukrainians should become the second, the
Israeli analyst argues, not only on moral grounds but also for deeply practical
ones.

“A
country battling foreign aggression needs to find new friends,” he writes, “and
the Caucasus can become an ally of Ukraine against imperial Moscow.”The Ukrainian parliament should recognize
this reality and adopt a resolution recognizing the Russian treatment of the
Circassians as genocide.

“May
21,” he concludes, “is a day of sorry and memory not only of the Circassian
people but of all peoples who have become victims of the pitiless and
destructive Russian colonialism, victims of Russian aggression.”